


"Why Can't You?"

by Livinginfictions



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Stiles, Bad Parent Sheriff Stilinski, Canon-Typical Violence, Don't copy to another site, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotionally Hurt Stiles Stilinski, Good Alpha Derek Hale, Hurt Stiles, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Mentioned Scott McCall (Teen Wolf), One Shot, Pre-Slash, Sheriff Stilinski Doesn't Know, Stilinski Family Feels, but it was an accident
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 15:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20641673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Livinginfictions/pseuds/Livinginfictions
Summary: Now. This was happening now, and he couldn’t be less prepared.-After a long night, things between Stiles and his father come to a head.





	"Why Can't You?"

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, welcome back to "Tali Writes When She's Depressed".  
This is another haze fic, which means that I literally don't remember writing most of it. Basically my hands hit the keyboard and the next day I sent it to my B-E-A-UTIFUL Betas, [PerseShow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerseShow) and [Madeline](https://pan-buck.tumblr.com) who helped me get it into a condition fit for posting.  
I don't know why I keep writing fics about the sheriff doing dickish things (though at least this time it was a mistake), but hey, I wrote something. That in and of itself is a miracle.

Stiles’ ribs and thighs were bruised. Deep purply-black bruises that throbbed with his heartbeat. He was only about forty-five percent sure nothing was damaged on the inside, but going to a hospital was kind of impossible without explaining the circumstances or getting his dad involved. He’d just have to ask Melissa to check him out tomorrow. In the meantime, he took the stairs as slowly as he could without outright stopping, hand clinging to the banister with clammy fingers. 

Somehow, it was the humans they had to fight that always managed to get Stiles the worst. Spirits and creatures of the night had rituals and instinctive motivations. They were scared or angry or protecting what they thought was theirs. Humans though, they had more complex issues. Revenge drove them to Beacon Hills in wave after wave, like the endless mode in a videogame. Fight and fight, and fight some more, until you die. No checkpoints, no finish line.

Logically, Stiles knew that wasn’t true. He _knew_ that Chris and Allison were working their asses off to establish truces and boundaries, and he knew it was working. This group of hunters weren’t even affiliated with any known clans. They were just a bunch of bitter, violent assholes who heard about the Hales returning to Beacon Hills and figured they’d try their luck. Amateurs, really. But still strong, still willing to kick the shit out of Stiles even after they figured out he wasn’t a wolf. Punishment for association, they said. It wasn’t exactly the first time Stiles’d heard that.

Reaching the top of the steps wasn’t the triumph Stiles had been hoping for. In fact, he kind of wished he’d just collapsed on the stairs because damn it, now he still had to walk over a dozen feet to get to his room. More to get to his bed. It was much more painful to fall all the way horizontal than just to sink to his knees on the sloping steps. To the bed, then. Slowly.

“You look like you were hit by a truck.” In another life, or even just a few years ago, his dad would have said that with some kind of humor. A wry smile, a commiserating huff. Or, considering how Stiles was bent over his injured stomach, fear.

Now, it was just a statement. No intonation whatsoever, because his dad knew how this would go. They both did.

“Rough practice,” Stiles said. By now he was an expert at hiding wheezes or groans of pain and his voice came out as steady as ever. Rather than jump to straighten his back, which would only increase suspicion, he put a hand over one of the bruises he could stand to touch and glanced down at it. “Took a shot to the gut.”

The song and dance was tired, but his dad did it anyway. Over and over again, expecting a different result. The definition of insanity, Stiles had heard somewhere. Totally inaccurate, but apt for the situation. “Oh yeah? Why didn’t you come home then? It’s late.”

One-two-Stiles took the third step of their little father-son waltz. “Scott invited me over for pity gaming. Sorry.”

He apologized a lot lately, even when he hadn’t actually said anything to warrant it. Maybe if he said it enough, his dad would know he was actually trying to apologize for everything he _didn’t_ say. For the lies of omission, for the lies of fabrication, minimization, and outright denial.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Stiles had wanted to tell his dad about everything. He’d just wanted to wait a little while, until things settled down. Until Scott had control over himself and Peter wasn’t trying to kill anyone, and Derek had established a pack, and the Argents had stopped hunting all of them down. Stiles was the post pessimistic person in the pack, aside from Derek, and still, he’d been too hopeful. Because it never did calm down. As soon as one thing was remotely taken care of, and sometimes even if it wasn’t, something else popped up. More dangerous than the last. Sure, back when it was just werewolves and hunters, Stiles had wanted to tell his dad. But now, when it was international assassins, zombies, demons, and on one occasion a giant blob of moss and dead animals, he couldn’t. No way, no how. Stiles wasn’t looking to get his dad murdered.

That didn’t make it any easier to watch his dad come to hate him. To resent every moment they spent together because they both knew it was just a facade, well constructed to the eye of anyone except a goddamn sheriff and his too-smart-for-his-own-good kid. To them, it was just tense.

There was nothing different about this time, compared to all the other times Stiles had come home hiding injuries over the last two years. But now, a month from graduation, his dad chose to break character and change the script.

“You’re a very good liar, Stiles.”

Stiles couldn’t remember the last time he was called ‘son’. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt like one. Like anything near that innocent. Take tonight for example; he’d _personally_ taken out the hunter who’d thought hooking him up to a generator was a good idea, and he’d done it before the pack had even managed to get to the basement he was chained up in.

Maybe it was the numbness that always followed his trips to what Scott quietly referred to as his “Darkside”, though Stiles was the one to teach him the fucking word, but Stiles didn’t bother pretending to be shocked. “Proud of me, pops?”

If he smiled too wide, his dad would see the blood staining his teeth and making him try not to gag. He’d chew carefully for weeks to avoid reopening the wound in his cheek.

“I’d be able to answer that if I knew what you were lying about.” His dad crossed his arms, and Stiles had to close his eyes for a second to breathe. Now. This was happening now, and he couldn’t be less prepared. “I’ve been trying to figure this out for you. So you didn’t even have to tell me. So I could just know, and if it was really as harmless as you were pretending, I was going to keep it to myself. Let you have your secrets.”

Stiles didn’t answer, but his heart sped up a little, a fresh dose of adrenaline bringing his dull mind buzzing back to real productivity. How much? How much had his father learned?

Had he learned about werewolves, about the hunters? Did he know about the breaking and entering, about the theft and assault both by and against Stiles? Did he know about the magic that Stiles had kept hidden from the pack for months just so he wouldn’t get their hopes up? Maybe he’d managed to find out about the multitude of knives stashed on Stiles’ body and bags and car, gifts from Allison and Derek, and the sharpest of them all, from Isaac. Did he know about the deaths, the murders Stiles had committed and aided for the sake of himself, his pack, his town, and the entire world?

His dad clearly wasn’t waiting for Stiles to speak, but he didn’t say anything either, just stared and clenched his jaw so tightly Stiles spared a brief, nostalgic thought for whether his dad was using that night guard for his teeth.

Then, finally, all hell broke loose. “Do you think I’m stupid?” His dad barked. “Do you think I don’t know a dislocated shoulder when I see one? A broken rib? A broken wrist? Do you know you you’re the only teenager I’ve ever heard of who thought he could convince someone that the bruises on his throat _were_ hickies?”

The quirk of Stiles’ lip had nothing to do with his father’s bloodshot eyes and everything to do with the fact that he hadn’t been referred to, let alone considered himself, a teenager since the end of sophomore year. To be quite honest, he usually forgot. They all did.

Stiles’ twitch only fueled the flames. “Do you think this is funny? I’ve been running a personal investigation on my own damn kid for two years, now. Trying to find out why my son was coming home late, if he came home at all, covered with injuries that up until now I’d only associated with the goddamn _mob_. I went through all the channels, Stiles, checked every insane theory I could come up with. Drug smuggling, human trafficking, the mafia, prostitution records. I ask the school about you and they tell me you only show up three days a week, but your grades are perfect. But you removed me from the absence alert list the day you turned eighteen, so they never thought to call me. Finstock actually came up to me in the grocery store three months ago to tell me what a damn shame it was you’d quit the team.”

Apprehension nearly choked Stiles, but he swallowed it down and said, ever so careful, in the tone he usually used while slipping a blade out of its hiding place, “And what did you find? All that searching, dad, and what did you find out?”

Rather than his father swelling up, bursting with an “Aha, I found everything and by god you will listen to what I have to say about it”, he just dropped his arms to his sides and muttered, “Nothing.”

Stiles couldn’t decide if he was disappointed or not.

“Not a single speck of evidence, Stiles,” his dad continued. “Every car I sent to follow you lost you in a couple blocks, every building I searched was clean. Not empty. There were fingerprints galore and hair and blood samples, and every one of them tested wrong. Somehow, even when I _knew_ you’d spent time in a building before an incident, you never showed up in the evidence. No recordings or tapes or receipts.”

Stiles licked his lips, only to spread the blood in his mouth to the outside. His dad’s eyes widened, but Stiles just smiled, baring his reddened teeth. “Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing? I mean my carbon footprint must be—”

His dad’s hands were rough on Stiles’ arms, but he was grateful for it. Grateful for any contact at all with the man he looked up to as a child. Still did. His dad’s voice was far more brutal in its shattered tone. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me? Stiles, I—I’ve spent more time that I’m ever going to be willing to admit thinking you were a serial killer. There’ve been times you walk in the room and my hand is on my gun even after I hear you greet me because I didn’t recognize you as anything other than an aggressor.”

He knew. He clocked that kind of move at fifty feet. It didn’t mean it didn’t send him to bed shaking, every time. To come home from a battle for his life and the lives of his pack, only to have his own father try to pull a weapon on him. To have to hold down his own instinct to palm and throw the spell in his mind before the bullet can leave the chamber. It was a good thing Stiles didn’t dream anymore, after finding a calming spell more potent than a horse tranquilizer to knock him out each night. To Stiles’ genuine shock, his dad dragged him into a hug, forcing a whine of pain through Stiles’ nose. Both of them ignored it.

“Don’t you understand I just want you to be safe?” His dad bit out. “Why can’t you go to school? Why can’t you play lacrosse? Why can’t you be—” He cut himself off.

And that was when Stiles’ mind betrayed him. Surrounded by wolves, he’d learned to pay extra attention in order to keep up with people who could smell and hear emotion. Stiles had to use touch and sight and much less refined hearing to get the job done himself. But he was good at it.

He saw it the moment his dad’s grief and worry changed to something bitter. With a jerk, Stiles pulled away. He stood tall, wounds be damned. “What did you say?”

His dad winced. “Nothing, it’s not important. I’m just—”

“What were you going to say? Why can’t I be _what?_” Every molecule in Stiles’ body was begging him to just stop, to give it up, but his mind had other ideas. Anxiety was a force to be reckoned with, and Stiles had never gotten a handle on it. He needed to know, and he needed to know now.

“Why can’t you be more like Scott?” Just getting the words out had made his dad more confident, and he steamrolled right over the moment Stiles’ heart stopped. “You think I didn’t do my research on him too? He’s your best friend, I was sure that whatever you were involved in, you were doing it together. But you aren’t, are you? I’ve spoken to Melissa a dozen times. She knows his daily schedule in and out. I spoke to Deaton, and he’s provided me with time punches of every shift Scott has had in the last two years. He’s star player of the lacrosse team, and for God’s sake, Stiles, he doesn’t show up at home with rope burn on his arms.”

The slam of Stiles’ bedroom door was muted. So was the banging of fists on his door and the shouting of his dad, demanding, “Stiles, _wait._ Stiles, _no_. Stiles, _son_, that’s not what I meant.”

Unsure what he was supposed to be waiting for, Stiles settled for a locking charm on his door that would keep the damn fire brigade out, and shoved the sill of his window open. Derek did it all the time, surely it wasn’t that hard.

It’d rained that afternoon, and the nearly dead lawn below his ledge was still mostly mud, so it broke his fall pretty well. Not well enough to avoid twisting his ankle, but that was nothing. Actually, everything was nothing. Other than needing to spit out the blood in his mouth into a bush, Stiles felt _fine_. So fine, in fact, that he broke into a run down the alley.

As the pack had come to discover, Stiles was interestingly, worryingly, _frighteningly_ good at repressing how much pain he was in.

For the first ten minutes of his walk, the blood in Stiles’ veins boiled and he screamed inside his head for all he was worth. Planning vengeance and rants and a half-formed idea for creating a golem that he could beat the shit out of without mercy.

The next twenty minutes of his walk, he quieted. The pain of all his injuries came back full force, along with a few he didn’t know he’d had, and his limbs turned to lead. Once again, Stiles was reduced to counting the steps to his destination. Five hundred yards. One hundred. Fifty. A hundred feet. Thirty feet.

When the front door to Derek’s loft slammed open, Stiles tried not to laugh at the already shifted face of his Alpha.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Derek pounced on Stiles, pulling him into the loft and sniffing him out for new wounds. “You were supposed to go home, what did you do to your foot?”

Stiles batted curious hands away. “Stand down, Jesus,” he rasped, throat dry despite his mouth’s copper tang. “This isn’t—it’s not a business visit.”

A testament to how much they’d come to trust each other, Derek immediately shifted back, and Stiles didn’t stab him when he grabbed hold of Stiles’ chin. Hell, he leaned into it.

Derek was an expert in managing to treat Stiles gently enough without being patronizing. He was the only person Stiles was willing to ask for help when it came to stitching himself up or wobbling back to his Jeep. Of course, he’d accept anyone else who offered, but most often, no one did. Revealing his penchant for sparkly charms and energy balls had kind of backfired amongst the pack. Because Stiles was able to keep up with them all the vast majority of the time, they tended to forget that he was still painfully human.

Derek didn’t forget. Then again, Derek was the only one Stiles really _couldn’t_ keep up with, so maybe it made sense.

In any case, he let Derek tug him by his jaw into the kitchen and obediently swished lukewarm water around his mouth until it blessedly stopped making him want to puke with every swallow. Spitting into the sink, Stiles found that with every issue that was removed—the blood, the paranoia that only fled when he was in the presence of pack, the cold weather—he got more and more mentally exhausted. Physical exhaustion was nothing new, but his entire head was about twice as heavy as it should have been.

Ever the prickly caretaker, Derek frowned at nearly the same moment Stiles thought about whether yawning might help. “Why are you here, if not business? And why do you stink?”

He was well aware that when any of the wolves commented on his smell, it never had anything to do with his actual hygiene. They’d all learned to tune that kind of thing out, especially after too many nights spent chasing people around and nursing them back to health. No, it was his emotions that stunk to high heaven for them. Erica had once called it his own special brand of everchanging Axe. Cloying and confusing and worrying.

Stiles took his time answering. He wiped the corner of his mouth on a paper towel, limped over to the couch, and sank into the cushion with the fragility of an old man. Then, he whispered, “Look, Derek, if I had anywhere else to go, I would.” Derek’s figure paused in its stride toward him. “I know how much this emotional crap makes you uncomfortable, and I don’t want to just drop it all on you. All I’m asking…is for a place to just sit for a while. I’ll leave whenever you get sick of me moping up the place.”

When Derek didn’t respond, Stiles assumed he’d been given haven, if only for a while, and he let go of himself enough to rest his elbows on his knees and shove his palms into his eyes. While oil spills of color rolled across his lids, he still tracked the body moving closer to him. When it settled on the cushion beside him, he didn’t even grunt. The company was nice.

“What would you ask for, if you’d gone to someone else? Someone who wouldn’t be uncomfortable?”

There was such a thing as feeling too safe, because he couldn’t choke back his dry sob. “A hug.”

Warm arms surrounded him, pulling him away from his corner and over a warm body until Stiles was tucked against the back of the couch with his face buried in Derek’s chest. One of Derek’s hands was tangled in Stiles’ hair, while the other was shoved under his chest and wrapped around his back. It couldn’t be remotely comfortable, but for the first time in a long time, Stiles felt like he could _breathe_ again.

The words, the explanation, spun tight circles at the front of Stiles’ mind. But his mouth refused to move. He was safe, and safe, and _fucking safe_. He didn’t want to think, let alone speak. Not until a seeping coolness began to drain the agony from his body. Then, he managed a single, “Don’t.”

Immediately, the pain drain stopped, and Stiles fell asleep.

He didn’t sleep long. When he woke up with crusted eyes and a whimper in his throat, he wasn’t alone. “This is why I don’t dream,” he whispered furiously, fingers clenching and unclenching in Derek’s shirt as the nightmare faded to the back of his mind. Not gone, but less present.

Derek didn’t speak, but his arms tightened to the point of discomfort. Again, Stiles didn’t mind.

“He doesn’t want me, Derek,” Stiles blurted softly, words barely forming lest he say them too loud and conjure up his shouting father. “He wishes I were Scott. He thinks I’m a killer, he hates me, he doesn’t want me, I can’t go back. I can’t go back. I can’t. Why can’t I just—-”

Hot lips pressed hard to Stiles’ forehead and Derek rumbled, “Hush. You don’t have to go back.” The _right now_ was unspoken, but Stiles wasn’t sure what he’d do if it _were_ spoken, so he didn’t argue the point. “You are not a killer. You are a protector. Your father wants you. He doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t wish you were Scott. You can, you can, you can.”

The tears sliding down Stiles’ cheeks and over the bridge of his nose went mostly unnoticed as he shook his head. “Make tomorrow stay away. Just for a while. Derek, _please_.”

“As long as you need it to.”

“Derek?” Stiles was falling again, dipping back into the darkness of his own mind, but not toward a nightmare. He knew the difference. “Can you help with the pain, now?”

Without another word, Stiles’ aches began to lift, just slightly, just enough.

Half asleep and still being crushed in a hug, Stiles heard Derek whisper. “We’ll tell him tomorrow. I’ll help you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Oof, according to my Betas, I may have caused some teary eyes, and man, I don't feel bad at all.
> 
> Thanks so much for reading! I don't normally do one-shots, but when a fic is done, it needs to be done, so here we are. If you're interested in hanging out with me you can find me both at my personal [tumblr](https://livinginfictions.tumblr.com/), and at my Sterek/Teen Wolf specific [tumblr](https://asterekmess.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Edit: So, a lot of people have commented on the "A hug" moment, and I love that you guys are so in tune with the emotion of the scene, so I figured I'd give you all a bonus fact.  
My husband is at college a few hours away from me, and I only get to see him like every two weeks. It's excruciating because we've never been apart remotely this long. I don't remember much from writing this fic, but I do remember that that line was specifically me being upset because I've never gone so long without one of his hugs and it's Killing me. It actually means a Lot that so many people like that line. That you all understand what meaning even something as small as a hug can have.


End file.
